IEDM 2016 Next Week – Siliconica

On December 3rd – 7th , the good and the great of the electron device world will make their usual pilgrimage to San Francisco for the 2016 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting. To quote the conference website front page, IEDM is “is the world’s preeminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and device modeling and simulation.”

That’s a pretty broad range of topics, but from my perspective at Chipworks, focused on the analysis of chips that have made it to production, it’s the conference where companies strut their technology, and post some of the research that may make it into real product in the next few years. Though these days process papers actually tend to be after the launch of the relevant product, such is the preoccupation with trade secrecy.